4 ms·

This is an extremely smug and tone-deaf take on the deterioration of trust in public health institutions and messaging. They reference covid in their abstract,

• upsidesinclude 4y ago
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• mlyle 4y ago
  You mischaracterize the study. The interesting finding is not that people who hold anti-consensus beliefs have lower scores on objective tests about related fields. It's that they are willing to bet more on their performance on those objective tests despite ultimately scoring worse. That is, there's a much larger difference between their subjective assessment performance and objective performance on the test metric (of both that field and other fields) than in people who don't hold the anti-consensus belief.
• notacoward 4y ago
  > they can sense when they're being lied to What sense is this? Do you have evidence of its existence? An explanation of how it works? Because in my experience the public is severely deficient in critical thinking skills. They don't really have a good sense of truth or falsehood. They make guesses about who's telling the truth based more on presentation, politics, or popularity than on facts or logic. Right now, there's an anti-intellectual and anti-authoritarian fashion causing many to conclude that anything a professional scientist says is a lie, but it would be wrong to cherry-pick a few examples where they're right as evidence of anything. How do such people "sense when they're being lied to" other than by using heuristics (see above) which are more likely to be gamed by entertainers and politicians than by scientists?
  • ogurechny 4y ago
    That people (as a whole) are stupid is old news. However, it is not because they don't behave as rational robots you seem to describe. It is totally possible to tell that someone is bullshitting you without having a university degree. Maybe that someone is using a salesman language to prove a point (maybe unwittingly, without knowing better). Maybe they are quite obviously demanding a pledge of allegiance to some list of statements without revealing any reasoning behind them (maybe unwittingly, as they never go to reasoning themselves). Maybe there's a giant gap between what they say (emotional slogans) and what they do (filling in checkboxes or making some numbers line up at any cost). There's plenty of chances of ordinary person to have such experiences in ordinary life, and become familiar with them. Also, I'm a bit puzzled by “anti-intellectual and anti-authoritarian fashion”. In my view, anti-intellectualism is a big topic that stretches from making pop-cultural works “accessible” to “shut up and calculate”, and is not a recent fashion. Neither is anti-authoritarianism, which might be the central cause here. It's not the science itself of which people are skeptical (quite the contrary, vague “science” has been the base of cosmological beliefs for a long time — even snake oils are often “scientific”), and not the intellectuals (even though modern ones should at most be called, erm, “columnists”). There is just a doubt that they value telling the (whole) truth more than they value their position, however unremarkable, in societal, professional, and bureaucratic chains of power, along with government workers, journalists, an so on.